Now, there is one nice new feature that we can take a look at and I will just make a linear gradient for it. This feature was added in Version 8. I just want a nice linear gradient so I am just going to do a background for the sky. Now, we cannot set any background colors to gradient. You will notice that we do not have any gradient swatches there. So to get a background in the back of the sky, all I will do is I will just add a layer for it. We will call it sky here and I will drag it down to the back and we can draw just a simple rectangle into it. A decent gradient for the sky would not be the blazing orange we have here. So let us switch that out instead to a nice easy linear gradient that goes from let us say a medium to light blue, down to a dark blue, maybe a little too dark. I will use my paint bucket to dump that on to that rectangle there. Of course, we can set up our handles and instead of doing it right to left, I could do it top to bottom and we squish it in a little bit more.

I will set it up top to bottom. That is a little bit more like what I was looking for just a clean gradient going around the outside. I seem to have gotten a stroke in there so I am going to get rid of that. The last feature I wanted to look at in the palette here was the overflow. This is a nice important one to take a look at it. I am not really going to use for the sky that much but we can use the sky one to illustrate how this is going to work. Let me see if I can get my handles there. Now, if I were to squish this gradient down, okay, we talked about the range of the gradient going from the light color or the left most color to the darker color which is the right most one. Light blue to dark blue in here and the scales specifying the range. With an overflow setting as is shown, the scaling tool is going to limit the edge of the gradient.

So you see I just get basically solid color on either end to this. With the other overflow settings, you can see what I have got here. From the picture itself, it is kind of self-descriptive. I have got a mirrored gradient so instead of just ending the gradient at this point, I could switch to a mirrored overflow setting and you can see that it goes from light to dark to light to dark and repeats over and over again as it fills up. We get kind of a psychedelic sky and the last setting is a repeating gradient. So it goes from light to dark, starts over, and goes to light to dark again. Now, I probably would not use any of these settings for my sky just a simple one. But, a simple linear gradient can show you how you can get those repeating gradients dropped in without having to create a very complicated ramp with all those repeating settings dropped into it. Now, that is a new feature in Version 8 so we can take advantage of that when the time comes.